According to Joe, apparently some dudes would “never date a girl who listens to Best Coast” because she basically sings solely about her cat and getting stoned and how much guys suck. I don’t know, that kind of sounds like the life of every 20-something girl I know, so I hope these anti-Best Coast dudes are down to date cougars or something. Like anti/post/pseudo/whatever feminists Carrie Bradshaw and Liz Lemon, Best Coast helps me to accept the crazy in myself, but they also illuminate an upside: while sometimes I feel rather insane, I know that I will never be crazy enough to move to Paris for a dude or hang an unnecessary wedding dress on my unused treadmill.
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If scent is the sense most closely tied to memory, then hearing must come in at a dangerously close second. The ailing logician in me is constantly inventing new ways to measure time, and one of my tried and true methods is through music. Once my roommate remarked how I listened to the same exact Taylor Swift album every single morning. At first I was embarrassed, but eventually I had to admit that he was totally right. In the same OCD way I develop routines and throw three-year-old-like temper tantrums when daily life strays from them, I seem to always have a soundtrack lined up to coincide with those routines. The weeks leading up to and following losing my virginity in high school it was the same song over and over on repeat– “Casimir Pulaski Day” by Sufjan Stevens, which is an interesting choice considering that song is about someone dying from cancer (the heart likes what it likes!). In Paris I listened to nothing but the Mountain Goats and Yelle. This semester it has been a heavy rotation of Metric/Emily Haines, Cat Power and Liz Pappademas, and last semester it was Taylor Swift, Ingrid Michaelson and Hurts to Purr (I am apparently a sucker for badass ladies with sultry voices).
I tend to mark each important time period in my life by the band that I was listening to then, and there rises an overwhelming desire in me to do this now that I am officially an NYU graduate (though I’ll get to that in more earnest terms in a later post, natch). When I think about my tenure at NYU, four specific songs come to mind that illustrate my experiences here–for better or (mostly) for worse. If we’re friends IRL, you’ll probably find yourself nodding in agreement. I mean, song number 1 is:
“Heartbeats,” by The Knife
Techno power anthem of freshman year, the badass beat was the perfect soundtrack to the pounding of candy-flavored vodka shots we so favored. They played this over and over again at Ruff Club. Yes, I used to go to Ruff Club.